What is a lead in marketing? 3 What are the important lead types?

The person the sales team wants as much as possible and the marketing team expects the sales to convert as quickly as possible? It is the lead - potential customers. But what is the full concept of Lead in marketing? What is a Qualified lead? What is the difference between lead types? How should businesses select leads? In this article, I will help you solve the above questions!

What is a lead in marketing?

What is a lead in marketing? Lead is a term in the marketing industry, used to refer to an individual or an organization that shows an interest in buying your business's product.

In short, a lead is a potential customer with a need (or interest) in what you're selling. In most cases, this audience will voluntarily provide their information to you.

Why are leads important to your business?

By bookmarking and storing potential buyers, you'll know exactly what stage of purchase these customers are at in your sales process. From there, you can plan to accelerate the customer's purchase process.

The goal of organizing sales is to make leads become their customers, generating revenue for the business.

What are the criteria for evaluating the quality of a lead in marketing?

Measure lead interest

Here are a few ways to help you determine quality and directly assess whether someone is qualified as a marketing qualified lead.

The examples that will demonstrate the amount of data that needs to be collected to properly assess their level of interest can vary widely.

Let's take a look at each of the following to see if your leads are quality:

Job application:

A person filling out an application demonstrates that they are willing to provide a lot of personal information because they are interested in being accepted for a position.

Filling out a job application shows their interest in the job, thus making them qualified to be the lead of your recruitment team, not a marketing lead or a sales lead.

Coupons:

Unlike in job applications, you often know very little about the person interested in your coupon. However, if your coupon is deemed valuable enough, a marketing lead can provide your name and email address in exchange for the coupon.

Although this amount of information is not much, it is enough to create an opportunity for businesses to know who is interested in their products.

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While with coupons you can know the target audience directly interested in your product or service, with content (ebook or webinar) it is not so simple.

So, to truly understand the nature of a person's interest in your business, you may need to put a lot more information together in order to qualitatively determine whether the person really is. Interested in the product or not to have a way to write content to reach the most potential customers. And the opportunity to turn them into real customers.

The three examples above show that attracting leads (lead generation) varies from business to business, to each specific customer. You need enough information to determine whether a person is genuinely interested in your product or service.

So how much information is enough? This depends on your business.

Let's take a look at the Episerver case. They use the web content report for lead generation, collecting 6 pieces of information from potential customers:

Full Name: the background information you need to communicate with each lead.

Email: this is a different information for each lead and is a means for you to contact your potential customers.

Company: this information allows you to research the industry and lead of a business, and how you can benefit potential customers (mainly for B2B marketing).

Role: understanding a person's role and title helps the marketing department communicate with them better. Each shareholder of a company will have a different view of your proposal (mostly for B2B).

Country: geographical location helps you segment customers by different regions and time zones, speeding up the spread of information, this is also an effective way to use leads in marketing. Typically, this “go deeper” and B2B marketing approach attempts to find brand representation aggregated using certain geographic data.

Bang: The more details you have without compromising communication, the better. This helps you evaluate potential customers more thoroughly.

It can be seen that after collecting the above information, it is also very important to analyze and select to use the data properly.

Lead scoring

Lead scoring is a quantitative way to evaluate leads. With this lead scoring technique, marketing leads are assessed with a scoring system to determine where they are interested on a scale from “interested” to “willing to buy”.

The lead scoring criteria are entirely up to you, but they must be consistent throughout the marketing and sales process so everyone on your team can work correctly.

Lead scoring can be the actions they take, the information they provide, the level of engagement with your brand, or other criteria that your sales team sets, collectively, the behavioral information you need.

For example, you might give a potential customer a high score based on how often they interact with you on social media, rather than how their demographics match your target audience.

Going back to the three examples above, you can give a customer a high score to use your coupon, because this behavioral information is a clear action that this person is interested in the product. your product.

When you notice that the higher the Lead scoring's rating system setup, the more likely they are to become SQL. You may have to adjust your marketing metrics and scores to find the fastest way.

What are the types of leads in marketing?

What is a lead in marketing? Leads appear in many stages of the sales funnel. As a result, different lead audiences are generated based on the stage they are in. You need to determine if these leads have been contacted by sales and marketing.

Attracting leads is not difficult, but to make sure these leads are really in need and have the financial ability to buy, we have to screen to have quality lead files (or even better ones). called qualified leads).

Qualified leads are divided into two types, Marketing and Sales.

1. What are Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs)?

Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), roughly translated as marketing leads, are customers who are likely to buy in marketing.

These audiences are often identified based on information that businesses collect through marketing channels. This information will then be analyzed to find a list of qualified leads.

Most businesses will market by creating demand for customers. The job is to get the potential buyer to become a lead. As mentioned above, for a customer to become a lead, they need to show a buying interest in the product.

There are many ways for them to express themselves, some examples are as follows:

Download content such as reports or templates

Attend a webinar or an online event

Fill in the contact form or request detailed product information

When a buyer interacts with a business in the above or similar ways, they'll be eligible to be listed as a marketing-qualified lead (MQL). You can then use this information to further promote and drive leads.

2. What are Sales-qualified leads (SQLs)?

Sales-qualified leads (SQLs) are potential customers who have been researched through the marketing or sales department (MQL) and are able and ready to buy. .

At this stage, once the MQL has been completed, responsible departments such as sales or business development will follow up to ensure that these leads are eligible to progress to the purchasing process. Once defined, these objects will be eligible to be added to SQL.

Convert from MQL to sales-qualified leads (SQL)

Many figures show that most MQLs cannot be used for sales:

Only 25% of leads qualify to be SQL

Therefore, creating a marketing and sales team working in sync will be very important in finding quality leads.

Companies with highly synchronous sales and marketing typically achieve 20% year-over-year growth. Generate more revenue from marketing (MarketingProfs) 208%

In the opposite cases, revenue is reduced by 4%.

For marketers, you need to create a quality lead generation list. For salespeople, you need to share and provide ongoing feedback to the marketing team about the quality of your leads. Thanks to that, both departments can effectively combine to bring revenue to the business.

3. Qualifying leads – qualified qualified leads

What is a lead in marketing? As mentioned above, not all leads will be able to buy your product. To determine which object has the highest probability of becoming a customer. You have to come up with a list of certain criteria to evaluate leads.
The criteria will vary depending on your target audience and the product you're selling. They will include details such as: age; sex; company size; address location; similar purchase history,..

A framework commonly used to identify qualified leads is BANT (Budget- Authority- Needs- Timing i.e. Budget - Authority - Need - Time). These four components can be considered as covering all the necessary criteria for evaluation. You can customize BANT to fit your sales team.

The best way to identify Qualifying leads is through phone calls. You can use short conversations to determine what they are interested in and if they can afford to buy your product.

Basic criteria to classify MQL and SQL

MQL classification:

You know the lead-specific details, including contact information.

Marketing Leads who have interacted with your Online Marketing activities, often by submitting personal information, interacting with advertisements, or to attend an online webinar or download a brochure. sales, for example.

Have data to suggest that they are a good fit to become a customer of your products or services.

They join (opt-in) to your marketing communications network.

SQL classification:

These Marketing leads continue to show interest in your marketing ads after the initial 'crawl' phase. This includes having them open and read your email.